Metu Ra en Nemsu - Words from the Enlightened - Page 59

Breadfruit · (#1451 (**permalink**))

The role and importance of ethnic history is in how well it teaches a people to use their own talents, take pride in their own history and love their own memories. In order to fulfill themselves completely, in all of the honorable endeavors it is important that the teacher of history of the black race find a definition of the subject, and a frame of reference that can be understood by students who have no prior knowledge of the subject.

The following definition is paraphrased from a speech entitled, "The Negro Writer and His Relation To His Roots," by Saunders Redding, in 1960:

Heritage, in essence, is how a people have used their talent to create a history that gives them memories that they can respect, and use to command the respect of other people. The ultimate purpose of history and history teaching is to use a people's talent to develop an awareness and a pride in themselves so that they can create better instruments for living together with other people. This sense of identity is the stimulation for all of a people's honest and creative efforts. A people's relationship to their heritage is the same as the relationship of a child to its mother.

I repeat:

History is a clock that people use to tell their time of day. It is a compass that they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It also tells them where they are, and what they are. Most importantly, an understanding of history tells a people where they still must go, and what they still must be.

John Henrik Clarke
Education for a New Reality in the African World

Breadfruit · (#1452 (**permalink**))

Menes, the first King of both Upper and Lower Kemet (Egypt)

"Human beings are equipped with what they need to do what they need to do and once they are stirred with that realization, there are no barriers."

"The Primary objective of freeing the Black mind is to change the consciousness of black people."

"We are ignorant of who we are and what we can do. We have a need to gain consciousness and only in consciousness is our true human capacity open to us."

Naim Akbar

Breadfruit · (#1453 (**permalink**))

"To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves, that the line stretches all the way back, perhaps to God, or to Gods. We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget; that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love, and die.

The grace with which we embrace life, inspite of the pain, the sorrows, is always a measure of what has gone before."

Alice Walker
In These Disseenting Times

Breadfruit · (#1454 (**permalink**))

"No matter how smart we are, no matter how diligent or persistent you have been, there is not one of us who made this journey toward success by ourselves."

Oprah Winfrey
Speech before the California Bar Association, 1991

Breadfruit · (#1455 (**permalink**))

"A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives."

Jackie Robinson

Breadfruit · (#1456 (**permalink**))

"Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand."

Colin Powell

Breadfruit · (#1457 (**permalink**))

"Traditional Africa has a strongly unitary conception of the world or reality. He does not erect a strict dichotomy between heaven and earth, the world of the ancestors and the world of man. There is constant traffic between the different levels of reality with each level supporting and being interested in what happens in the others.

Kwame Nkrumah calls the dichotomy of different levels of reality “the dialectical contradiction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside,” and remarked that in Africa this division was reduced “by making the visible world continuous with the invisible world. For them heaven was not outside the world but inside it.”

J. Obi Oguejiofor
RESOURCES FOR PEACE IN AFRICAN PROVERBS AND MYTHS

Breadfruit · (#1458 (**permalink**))

"Long before the French decreed liberty, egalité, et fraternité, Africans imprisoned in cacao, sugarcane, and cotton fields in the Americas were already revolting against their exploitation. They rallied against oppression and exploitation based on skin color and social position and in favor of human redemption. This trend had been evident by the beginning of the seventeenth century with the Quilombo dos Palmares in Brazil and Yanga Rebellion leading to the palenque (maroon community) of San Lorenzo de los Negros, now known as Yanga, in Mexico.

These initial rebellions that led to the creation of multiethnic free maroon communities were led by Central African Bantu-speaking people. The names of leaders like Zumbi of Palmares in Brazil, Yanga in Mexico, and the Loangos in Venezuela, bespeak their origins.

Rethinking history to demystify Africa's political and moral contributions to the Americas, and pursuing this line of inquiry into both comparative marooning and the contributions to "the idea of independence" in the Americas by Africans and their descendants, is an important task. We must debunk the dishonest and inconsistent historical discourses that assume Eurocentric hegemonic authority and ignore and distort African contributions to the formation of the American nations. Unraveling hegemonic discourses of the "other" discourses about descendants of Africans the world over has been and continues to be necessary."

Jesus "Chucho" Garcia
Demystifying Africa's Absence in Venezuelan History and Culture

Breadfruit · (#1459 (**permalink**))

"The contradiction to which we referred earlier arises from the fact that those who claim to represent democracy in world politics are intent to define democracy in a manner that serves the interests of the high and mighty, in a way that promotes the cause of a new oligarchy. To achieve this objective, the representatives, theoreticians and publicists of this new oligarchy will stop at nothing, including the denial of their own history.

Contrary to these, we uphold it as an undeniable historical truth that so-called Western democracy owes everything that is progressive within it to revolution. And more, it owes many of its claimed achievements these 200 years, to the actions of the oppressed and the enslaved who fought and sacrificed in order to defend and maintain democratic principles and to expand the horizons of humankind.

It is true that the abolition of slavery was enacted by a British Parliament, but it was the refusal of many thousands to acquiesce in their own slavery that created the imperative for the legislation. It is a distortion of the truth to speak of Britain, France, Spain or Portugal "granting" independence to this or that colony. Independence was achieved because the colonised struggled and made colonial rule untenable, and even where there were no formal wars of liberation, many died in the process.

The descendants of those who brought into being the Magna Carta, those who rallied to the cry of "Libertè, Egalitè, Fraternitè", and those who signed the "Declaration of Independence", today demand recognition of the fact that they were prepared to die in order to fight fascism, to defend peoples against foreign occupation and destroy the scourge of Nazi racism. Yet we should not forget, that they were not alone in that war. In addition to the millions in the socialist countries who died, many hundreds of thousands of young black people from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia also sacrificed their lives for these objectives."

Oliver Tambo (1967—1991)
SPEECH AT THE PEOPLE'S NATIONAL PARTY FOUNDER'S DAY BANQUET
KINGSTON, JAMAICA
JULY 4, 1987

Breadfruit · (#1460 (**permalink**))

"We have followed the history of this relationship, in so far as it is a matter of government policy in South Africa, to the late nineteenth century. Its true origin, however, is neither governmental nor political. It emanates from the pitch-dark days of slavery.

The unexampled profits which slave labour yielded to slave masters and investors in an expanding world trade between European Powers and their colonies, with the clamorous demand for more slaves and more slave labour, initiated a wholesale invasion of the African coast and interior by slave traders, who seized thousands of Africans and flooded the slave market with slaves from Africa, to the total eclipse of non-African slaves. The result was that "slave" came to mean "African slave" and the black skin became the universal badge of slavery and inferiority.

As Europe and America grew more prosperous, and in order that they might grow even more prosperous, the humiliation, degradation, and dehumanisation of man by man continued as black African slaves were beaten, tortured, hanged, exposed to conditions which killed them in tens of thousands year after year, persecuted and terrorised, and in general confined to a separate existence of their own - an existence more animal than human, nearer death than life. All this was done in an attempt to subdue and subordinate them to rigid control and to extract more and more labour from them without the risk of a revolt. It was the status of the slave, the purpose for keeping him in that status, and the methods which it became unavoidable to use which were later to lend force to the movement for the abolition of slavery.

But the slaves were the private property of their owners and a vital economic asset. The Cape had not lagged behind in availing itself of this asset. By 1806, 25,000 settlers owned a population of 30,000 slaves. Thus it was that the decision of the British Government to order the emancipation of slaves in all British colonies was deeply resented by slave-owners at the Cape as being an unwarranted interference in their domestic affairs and personal rights, and as showing disrespect for their doctrines and beliefs. The slaves were emancipated, but the grievances remained and for many of the dispossessed owners became the chief of several causes of the Great Trek, which culminated in the establishment of the Boer Republics. Something else remained: the mental attitude which had learnt to recognise in a slave a black man, in the black man a slave, and in both a subhuman.

This was not peculiar to South Africa, but while the rest of the world has now acknowledged that all men are equal, the "people" of the Republic of South Africa will permit no equality between white and Coloured inhabitants."

Oliver Tambo (1967—1991)
"Apartheid - the Indictment"
April 1964

Breadfruit · (#1461 (**permalink**))

"Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values."

Ralph Ellison

Breadfruit · (#1462 (**permalink**))

"Why here in America the seeds of racism are so deeply rooted in the white people collectively, their belief that they are ‘superior’ in some way is so deeply rooted, that these things are in the national white subconsciousness.

Many whites are even actually unaware of their own racism until they face some test then their racism emerges in one form or another."

Omowale Malcolm X